Mindset is everything – and on this episode of Seeking Wisdom, DC and DG talk about the power of changing your mindset to help change your life. Whether you’re starting a new job, a new project, a new business, or training for a marathon, this episode will help you unlock the power of a growth mindset and realize the difference between scarcity and abundance. Plus a whole bunch of books from DC and DG, including:

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with DC and DG on Twitter @dcancel and @davegerhardt.

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In This Episode

0:01 – Check this episode out on our YouTube channel
0:59 – Introduction of “mindset”
1:48 – Our secret project
3:11 – Getting paralyzed by where you have to go instead of taking the next step
3:18 – Don’t get worried about mile 24 of the marathon when you haven’t run mile 1 yet
3:43 – DC on removing constraints
4:53 – DG highlights a growth mindset, suspending disbelief and abundance vs. scarcity
6:17 – Abundance says: somehow, the more you give, the more you get back
8:15 – Fight the evolutionary scarcity reflex and focus on abundance
8:29 – How bad do you want it? What are you willing to invest?
9:29 – DC’s never met a person who has gone broke buying books! Invest in knowledge
10:46 – The “suspend disbelief” mindset says, “Yeah, it’s never been done before!”
11:11 – DG asks DC what books he’s been reading
14:05 – DC shares what he’s been reading
15:31 – Be sure to check out our new #Growth podcast in this feed
15:49 – Build podcast is now its own feed

Full Transcript

DC: All right, we’re back. I notice, I’ve been watching the YouTube version of this.

DG: Me too, I’ve been watching more videos.

DC: Yeah, the video version is the way to go, I think.

DG: It’s better. It’s better.

DC: So subscribe on the YouTube’s. Look below, you’ll find a click somewhere.

DC: I’ve been noticing I need to get some new get-ups because I look the same in all the shots.

DG: I’ve noticed the same thing. Every day I wear … Every time we’ve done sequisim I have this gray crew neck, a blue crew neck and a vest.

DC: Yes.

DG: That’s it. And you’ve been recently a lot in the blazer.

DC: Blazer.

DG: And the-

DC: And the scarf.

DG: The scarf.

DC: So I need some new outfits. Please write in, let us know. Tweet at me, send me a little note tell me what kind of outfits should I be wearing for this to razzle it up, add some pizazz.

DG: There you go, Video Dan. As you’re watching this, that’s a clip on its won right there.

DC: Yeah. Let me know.

DG: So, I want to talk today on seeking wisdom.

DC: Okay.

DG: I want to talk to you about mindset.

DC: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

DG: Mindset. Because I think we have not talked about mindset in a while. I’m recently experiencing something with mindset that I want to talk you through.

DC: Oh, I want to hear about it.

DG: Okay. So, we’re going to talk about mindset.

DC: Okay.

DG: We’re going to dig in the crates a bit. There’s a couple old topics in here. By the way, I switched to just this-

DC: What’s going on with this spiral-

DG: High school looking spiral notebook that I found at my house and I love it.

DC: Yeah.

DG: It feels very raw. You know, we’re just writing sick stuff.

DC: I think it looks better that way.

DG: You do?

DC: Because you can open it flat.

DG: Yeah. You can open it flat. So, I’m in this book right now. Annie draws in it sometimes. There’s some stuff in the … There’s some crayons and stuff in the back.

DC: Oh, look at that. That’s why he likes it.

DG: Oh, she definitely didn’t draw that.

DC: But she’s a protégé.

DG: She’s a protégé. All right. So let’s talk about mindset. Here’s why I want to talk about mindset. Right now we are behind the scenes working on a little crazy project that we’re going to be working on … I’m not telling anybody what it is. Not even giving, like, a hint of a tease. But you know what it is, okay.

DG: When I laid it out for the whole team everybody was like, “Oh, boy.” He’s giggling because it’s true.

DG: No. G2 did text me over the weekend and said, “I’m super excited.” But it takes a little while to marinate.

DC: Yeah, yeah. They were stunned?

DG: Stunned.

DC: Is that right you two? Look it, G2’s sweating.

DG: The reason I want to talk about this is because I think a earlier version of me would have thought the same thing. But I’ve learned this lesson from being here, and through you setting crazy ass goals. I want to talk about that. Because, and then I recorded a video for the team. I said, the next day I slept on it I said, “Okay, look I realize everybody’s freaked out. But I want to explain this. Because I want to explain that if we let the fear of how big this thing is going to be, we will never, ever get started.” I said, “You can use this analogy for everything we’ve done at Drift, right.”

DG: Think back to where we were a year ago, or two years ago. If you looked at the goals for that year, you know you always unveil the company goals. If everybody there was just … I think too often people get paralyzed by where you have to go as opposed to taking the next step. The analogy I said, “Everybody is worried about what’s going to happen on mile 24 of the marathon when we haven’t even run mile one yet.”

DC: Totally.

DG: I didn’t used to think that way, and I wanted you to share some wisdom on how you get yourself to think that way.

DC: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Hmm. I love that.

DG: I think it’s related to-

DC: I can’t believe that people weren’t excited and weren’t thinking it was awesome. Or just high fiving in the room just like-

DG: We can’t wait.

DC: Let’s do it. They were stunned. Yeah. It’s typically. It’s to be expected. I think mindset’s a super important thing that we’ve talked about a long … In the early, early episodes we talked about a book called ‘Mindset’ by Carol Dweck. Good book, little hard to get through but it’s a good book. But mindset is so important. So that’s why we do things like when we set this big hairy audacious goals, be hags, like you just gave them. That’s important for the people to come in with the right growth mindset and think about how would we do it? Suspend disbelief for a second, how would we do it?

DC: Too often we get caught up on, “I don’t have the right thing. I don’t have the right set up. I don’t have the right climbing gear. I don’t have the right thing. I can’t do it.” Like, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. Instead you got to turn that mindset around to having this how can I do it? How could we do it?

DG: How could we do it?

DC: Yeah. Let’s start from scratch. Let’s assume, let’s suspend disbelief. Let’s assume that we can start from scratch, that we have infinite resources. How would we do it? Now if we constrain it how would we do it?

DC: That’s how all the great things that any of us achieved, and that we’ve achieved so far in these early days so far, have come from suspending disbelief.

DG: So I wrote down three things. I wrote down growth mindset. I wrote down suspending disbelief and I abundance verse scarcity. Because I think that’s kind of the over … That fits right in, in both of those things. Can you re-explain abundance verse scarcity? This is where we want to rewind, go back there’ll be a clip abundance verse scarcity for you OGs.

DC: Yeah, play clip here. Yeah, we did an abundance verses scarcity mindset podcast. Must have been one of the really first ones. It’s about what do you want your default, your mindset towards? You can default your mindset towards this idea of scarcity. That things are always going to run out. That you can’t share things because … You can’t share something because it’s a zero sum game. That if you share something with someone else then that means nothing will be left for you verses coming into things and thinking about it from an abundance standpoint. Saying the more I give, give, give, give, give, give, give occasionally someone will return, right. I won’t even ask, they will give back. Because they have this abundance mindset. Instead, the more that you put into the world, out into the world or out the more you’re going to get back.

DC: Right, it’s like this thing that you always here, which I totally believe. When it comes to giving, right. Let’s say it’s giving money, giving resources, donations. A lot of times you have a scarcity mindset and you think, “Hey, I can’t give away 10%, or 5% or this amount because that means less for me.” The thing that you’ll hear from everyone, including myself, who tries to focus a lot on giving, in this case in an philanthropic standpoint is somehow, someway, the more you give the more you get back.

DG: Yeah.

DC: I don’t know how that works in the universe, it works.

DG: It’s like time. DC buys me lunch three out of five days of the week, and look at what you get.

DC: Exactly, I get all this. Exactly. I have to work on lunch, it’s coming back.

DG: So, I love that you took it there because I wrote down something from one of my favorite lessons around this. Is, great book, ‘Seven Strategies for Wealth and Happiness’ Jim Rohn. Who, Jim Rohn, we’ve talked at length about Jim Rohn on this podcast. Jim Rohn was Tony Robbins original mentor.

DC: Yes.

DG: Okay, in that book Jim Rohn said something, he’s talking about basically a guy who doesn’t have a lot of money and somebody who’s very successful. He wants to pick that guys brain. He says, “I want to go out to dinner.” He says in that scenario most often that person would say, “But I’m expecting you to pick up the check.” But the reality of it is if that person just thought, “Hold on I got two hours with dinner with this guy, and it’s going to maybe cost me 100 bucks. That’s an investment that I’m going to make that’s going to last me forever.”

DC: Totally.

DG: It’s the same way we think about spending money on books, right. People, “Well, it’s 12.99.” It’s the same mindset.

DC: It’s a lot of money, I can’t afford it. I can’t afford it. That’s the scarcity mindset versus saying from an abundance standpoint if I learn this lesson. If I pick where I eat. If I pick the right book, or pick the right mentor and I invest something in there what will the return be? Right, it’s this long-term view. It’s really important to have this abundant mindset. It’s easy because of evolution for us to default into this scarcity mindset because we have evolved during times of great scarcity in terms of, “If I give away this food to DG, if I give him this salad over here I’m not going to have any salad for me.”

DG: Right.

DC: Right? And there’s no salad to get out there. We live in a time of abundance. Crazy abundance right now and so right now’s the time that you need to fight that evolutionary based kind of reflex and focus on abundance.

DG: I had an example of this come up. Somebody sent me a message and said, “Hey, DG, I’m a fan. I like what you have to say about marketing. I’m interested in if you would take me on as a mentor.” I said, “You know what, this happens a lot,” which is, like it’s crazy.

DC: Awesome.

DG: Right. Awesome. But, I said, “You know what, I’m just going to try something.” I said, “Sure. I offer paid mentoring services and here’s how much it costs.” He said, “Oh, I was just hoping I could pick your brain over coffee sometime.” I’m like, you know it’s not like I said it’s going to be 10 grand for an hour. But, that to me is the test. How bad do you want it? Are you willing to invest? And it’s the little things like I used to not buy anything. Now, if you send me a book on Amazon, buy it. If you send me a book on Audible I buy it. You tell me about this other thing that I can’t mention here, I buy it, right.

DC: Yeah, don’t tell them.

DG: I think it’s that mindset that then you’re sitting on this wealth of knowledge that you’re going to tap into. Instead of thinking about that means I can’t do this thing. I think that’s been a huge change.

DG: That sounds like a Warren Buffet quote. That sounds like a Warren Buffet, “I’ve never met … ” Wow.

DC: Please write in. Send me an email. If you are that person who has gone broke because you’ve gotten too many books. That you have paid too much for knowledge.

DG: Meet Todd. Meet Todd. Todd used to have a house, and now he lives on the street because he bought-

DC: He bought too many books.

DG: He spend all his money on books.

DC: No. I haven’t met that person. So please write in if you are that person. What’s my point? My point is that if you invest in something like that, even through you have this scarcity mindset of not having enough money, the truth is that you’re not going to go broke buying books. If you read those books, you apply the lessons that you’re learning in there into what you want to do. That’s not what you’re going to go broke from. Don’t worry about that. Worry about going broke from your Starbucks addiction. Or the other stuff.

DG: Or buying sneakers or something.

DC: All the other stuff that DG buys.

DG: Yeah. Everything. Smoothies, sneakers. You can live without all that stuff.

DC: Yeah. Green smoothies. $15 smoothies.

DG: You can make them on your own. I made my own this morning. It was lovely.

DG: All right. So, that’s a learning mindset. I want to bring this whole thing back to the beginning which is like we’re about to start on some big crazy project. I do think that, I think if we want to be just like everybody else it’s easy to be like, “Oh, that seems like too much work. So we’re just going to do it this way.”

DC: Yep.

DG: Right? Where I think the suspend disbelief is that, that is a mindset of, “Yeah, it’s never been done before.” That’s why we’re going to do it.

DC: That’s awesome. Yeah. I love that. I have the growth mindset. I want more projects-

DG: Growth mindset. DC has the ultimate of growth mindset. If Salesforce Tower is 100,000 million feet tall, Drift Tower will be, I don’t even know.

DC: Yeah. That plus five.

DG: Plus a boat.

DC: Yeah.

DG: Anyway. Are you reading anything right now?

DC: I’m ready so many things.

DG: What are you learning?

DC: I finished ‘Make Time’, which I wrote about in our … We have an internal, a Sunday night newsletter that I started.

DG: Yeah.

DC: Plus we have an external Sunday night newsletter which I love.

DG: Reminded me of last weeks episode, by the way. I’ve been running into [Hambissa 00:11:27] in the kitchen a lot.

DC: Oh, really.

DG: I said, “DC made up a new nickname for you.”

DC: Yeah.

DG: “Called Ham.”

DC: Ham Money.

DG: He goes, “No, some people call me that.”

DC: See. That’s what I said. I knew it-

DG: Because his last name is [Goso 00:11:39], and so he says his nickname is Go So Ham. I said, “Damn.”

DC: Oh, that’s good. Go So Ham.

DG: That’s pretty good.

DC: What’s up Go So Ham?

DG: So, you finished ‘Make Time’.

DC: Yeah. I wrote about it, I have an internal Drift only newsletter. Kind of reflect, and I wrote about this book ‘Make Time’. I also wrote … Which is a good book. It’s written by the two guys who wrote ‘Sprint’. Ex Googlers. Enjoyed that book. So if you want to be more effective take a look at that book.

DC: I also mentioned some other books to help you on the-

DG: And did you speak of making time?

DC: Yeah.

DG: Didn’t you blow up your calendar recently?

DC: In which way?

DG: I think-

DC: Oh, yeah.

DG: You started over.

DC: Yeah. I started over. So, I went you know-

DG: Because you made the comment to me … You made a comment to me the other day. They’re like, “I don’t think I’ve sat at my desk for this long in years.”

DC: Yeah, yeah. I had sat at my desk, I sit next to DG, for I don’t know two hours, three hours. I was like, this is weird. I was like, that’s a lot of time. I haven’t sat here this long. What am I supposed to do? Because I’ve been in just a ton of meetings. So I’ve been putting into place the stuff from ‘Make Time’. Basically clearing out my calendar, I’ve gotten email under control. Have started to get my calendar under control. There’s a couple other books that I kind of recommended in there. Went back to the classics, Stephen Covey. I’m re-reading this book, actually, for the umpteenth time, ‘The Seven Habits’.

DG: You’re re-reading that right now?

DC: Yeah.

DG: Really?

DC: Yeah, highly effective people. Highly recommended that. Actually, that quote that I sent you this morning two of them was from that book.

DG: I was trying to figure out where was that from.

DC: Yeah. So, pick that book up if you haven’t read it. Timeless classic.

DG: Why did you pick it? Was it just on the shelf and you’re like, “Oh.”

DC: We were talking internally about big rocks. I wrote, in this newsletter about big rocks. I said, “Big rocks is a concept that we talk it about it from the book ‘The One Thing’. But it originally came from Stephen Covey’s ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’.” Have you read that book yet DG? No? Oh, my goodness.

DG: Well give him the print out.

DC: That explains it.

DG: The print out.

DC: Yeah. So, anyway we’ll get him a copy of that book. Re-reading that book right now. Then I got a couple others. You know what book I just finished? Audiobook?

DG: What book?

DC: Little book by someone called U-God.

DG: Oh, you did? Really?

DC: Oh, yeah. I read that book.

DG: Wow.

DC: U-God, if you don’t know shame on you. U-God is one of the members of the Wu-Tang Clan.

DG: Wu-Tang Clan.

DC: He wrote a book ‘Entering the Wu-Tang’ I believe that’s the title.

DG: It was good?

DC: Yeah. Listened to it. He read it, it was awesome.

DG: Should I listen to it?

DC: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

DG: Okay.

DC: It’s fun. Yeah. It gives you the story about … Took me back in time to the old DC. But old New York style. Yeah.

DG: Old New York style.

DC: What are you reading now?

DG: I just finished an audiobook that’s top secret.

DC: Okay. Top secret.

DG: I can’t share that one. I’m going deep. You got me all these Roy Williams Wizard of Ads books. I’m about to finish the first one. I’m a little bit more neurotic than you are, I need to read … There’s three and they come in a series. You’re send … I was so screwed up because you’re sending me … And they’re all the chapters are numbered. So you’re sending me chapter 31, and I go to my book 31 and it’s different.

DG: I’m reading two books at night. I can’t read the work stuff at night because it just goes off. So, somebody got us … a Loyal Seeking Wisdom listener got us this book about Micheal Lombardi and Bill Belichick, I’m reading that book.

DC: Salute. You know who you are.

DG: I’m reading a book called ‘Sons and Soldiers’ which is a crazy true story. I think it’s going to be the next ‘Unbroken’ which is about World War II and a bunch of people who escaped Germany and then came back as a US Army member to fight Hitler. It’s a crazy, crazy story.

DC: Yes. Please leave a six star review and say, “G2,” that’s the letter G the number two. “You have to read ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People-”

DG: Done.

DC: “In order to up your game. Signed loyal Seeking Wisdom Community Member.”

DC: We had some exciting news today that we launched on the blog, before we go. We’re launching a new podcast and in this feed you’ll be starting to see Growth. It’s #GrowthPodcast that’ll you’ll be seeing in here. It’s all about growth marketing. I think you guys’ll like it.

DG: Growth is going to be a good one.

DC: Good one. The Build Podcast that you’ve been listening to on this feed has now moved, graduated, and has become its own feed wherever you get podcasts.

DG: Harbor Business School grad. Olympian.

DC: Olympian.

DG: Own podcast.

DC: Yeah.

DG: Shout out to-

DC: Maggie Crowley.

DG: Maggie.

DC: Running … So if you know any one in product, you like building product, you want to hear about the future of product subscribe to Build by Seeking Wisdom wherever you subscribe to podcasts.